India revels, UK shrugs

Rishi Sunak took charge yesterday as Britain's third premier this year with his Conservative Party floundering in the polls and daunting challenges ahead.

The 42-year-old was born and raised in Southampton, but his appointment as his country's first prime minister of colour has been cheered by Indians who still consider him a son of the soil.

"I am extremely happy," Krishna Kumar, an Indian IT worker, told AFP in the capital New Delhi.

"Great Britain is a country which ruled India for more than 300 years -- now a person of Indian origin is going to rule UK."

Sunak's parents were born into the Indian diaspora in east Africa, and trace their heritage back to pre-independence Punjab in northern British India.

At 42, Sunak also became the youngest prime minister of modern times once he is confirmed in office by King Charles III.

Fabulously rich from his previous career in finance, the former hedge fund investor, an observant Hindu, faces daunting challenges in power, from an economic crisis to uniting his fractious party.

He is married to Indian-born Akshata Murty, whose father co-founded IT giant Infosys.

Sunak's father was a family doctor in Southampton on England's south coast, and his mother ran a local pharmacy. Sunak waited tables in a local Indian restaurant, before progressing to Oxford and then Stanford University in California.

He swears his oath of allegiance as an MP on the Hindu Bhagavad Gita.

Sunak's ascent has been the subject of wall-to-wall television coverage in India, animating discussion during the usually lethargic Diwali holiday season.

"Indian son rises over the Empire -- History comes full circle in Britain," read a news banner splashed on broadcaster NDTV.

Despite Indians hailing Sunak's appointment as a historic moment for both countries, the political and economic instability he inherits has muted expectations for his tenure.

But for many UK South Asians, as with the country at large, the arrival of Britain's first prime minister of colour provoked as much debate about his economic credo as about the colour of his skin.

Anand Menon, politics professor at King's College London, said Sunak's ethnicity was "a really, really big deal".

But he added on BBC television: "What reassures me most, actually, is how little comment there has been about it, in a sense that we seem to have normalised this."

If it feels "normalised" now, a brown or black prime minister would have felt unimaginable in Britain only a few years ago.

When Sunak was born in 1980, there had been no Asian or black MPs since World War II.

A handful was then elected for the opposition Labour party. But the Conservatives still had none when Sunak graduated from the University of Oxford in 2001.

In the late 1960s, many were in thrall to the firebrand Tory Enoch Powell, who warned of racial civil war if mass immigration from the old Empire continued.

Polls at the time found a majority of white Britons agreed with Powell.

Today, according to Sunder Katwala, director of the demographics think tank British Future, "most people in Britain now rightly say the ethnicity and faith of the prime minister should not matter".

"They will judge Sunak on whether he can get a grip on the chaos in Westminster, sort out the public finances and restore integrity to politics," he said.